Brittany Beiersdorf Ross

“Woman in Prayer”

What lies beyond the boundary of sight has long been the passion expressed and conjured by the visionary artist. The inner language of the sacred comes as an invocation, a path paralleled by personal myth.

Evoking timeless archetypes, Brittany Beiersdorf’s creative process is a living credo reminding us of the innate beauty within the universe, nature, and divine mystery.

From her early works making films on 16 millimeter, Beiersdorf’s Bolex camera was her muse: the very treasure of the unfolding, a moving nautilus opened to light only to return to darkness. While attending the avant-garde School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, her romance with the moving image shifted to the still image. A love of Polaroids and the magic of instant photography began to merge a new way of seeing herself and the medium of image capturing. Beiersdorf subsequently discovered the ephemeral technique of using Type 55 Polaroid negatives with a 4×5 pinhole camera during her studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. The in-the-moment process of developing negatives on the spot, surrounded by the elements, was integral to the spirit-infused images Beiersdorf was creating. After her exhibition in New York City, “Vision of the Initiate,” it was apparent the prophecy within the photographs had been activated in her very reality.

As an adolescent in the remote area of Virginia, Beiersdorf’s creative impulse originally began with literature and poetry. Transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson who echoed the holy within the natural landscape ignited her courtship with nature and the mystical. During the past several years, using elaborate journals and art books, Beiersdorf intuitively began evolving that initial inspiration by making mixed-media paintings. Vibrant in color, embodied by shamanic presence, and iridescent as an abalone shell, they evoke the lost imagery and forgotten messages of the celestial world.

Brittany has an eight-year-old son named Cheveyo. Together they reside in a forest property in Northern Virginia called the Perch.